A Week in Hacker News

[mjtokelly]

http://mjtokelly.blogspot.com/2009/03/week-in-hacker-news.html

[pg]

That is fascinating. Admittedly probably more to me than anyone else. What do the red titles mean? Could you make a version that plays at half the speed? It would be interesting if the background changed color to show day and night PST.

[mjtokelly → pg]

Thanks!

The #1 story is bright green, changing to dark green until it's off the front page. Then it turns red, with alpha = 1 / (rank - 30)

Sure, I'll be glad to put up another video. Will reply again when it's ready.

Or, could send you the code and data if you want to play around with it.

[RK → mjtokelly]

I'd be interested in the matplotlib code if you could put it on your blog...

[riklomas → RK]

I'd be quite interested in the data set if you're willing to release it

[mjtokelly → riklomas]

Scraping script, plotting script, and original data are at

http://www.broad.mit.edu/~mokelly/other/grab_HN.zip

Enjoy!

[mjtokelly → pg]

See

http://www.broad.mit.edu/~mokelly/other/hn.avi [mp4 format]

Half-speed, with PST day-night cycle (6am-6pm). Printed timestamps are still EST, as in the original.

[pg → mjtokelly]

Quicktime doesn't seem to want to play it. What's the standard way to play an avi file on a Mac?

[mjtokelly → pg]

Give this a try:

http://www.broad.mit.edu/~mokelly/other/hn.mov

It still uses the mp4 codec, but with Quicktime's prefered container format (if I understand correctly).

[pg → mjtokelly]

That is great, thanks. BTW, Trevor also found this very interesting.

[mjtokelly → pg]

You're quite welcome! Glad to hear it.

Anyone with questions about using/changing the source code is welcome to contact me at mokelly@hlcam.com. I'd be very proud to have this incorporated into HN...

[lacker → pg]

VLC is good for pretty much every format of video on OS X.

[timmorgan → pg]

It says in his explanation -- green stories made the front page; red did not.

[brent → timmorgan]

Actually, he says green are on the front page and red are not. They could have been on front page at some time.